You wouldn’t think that it would be such a big deal to flick a switch and have the lights come on. For Ryan, Kristen and me, it’s a big deal. And yesterday it finally happened.
You see, we bought our office condominium in The Linden, a building built in the 1880s and renovated in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The many, many charms of an old building are not without their complications, and, in our case, electricity has been Complication-in-Chief. A series of a few units together used to comprise the floor plan of The Linden’s restaurants. (Anyone from Hartford remember Spencer’s or Corney T’s or The Emperor?) Over the years our office’s electrical service, therefore, became — or always had been, who knows — intertwined with the electrical service of the other condo units that made up the old restaurant space. It was a veritable linguini of the ages. (Our saint of an electrician is Dave from Whitehouse Electric in South Windsor, Connecticut. We can’t say enough great things about him.)
Yesterday after we spent some quality time with Sid in the bathroom section 0f Lowe’s ordering a door for the shower and picking up sundries for the office, we stopped into the space to visit Dave and drop off switch plates.
The most obvious manifestation of our electrical mess was that at no point since we first looked at the unit back in March have the lights in the basement turned on. So, yesterday when Dave told Kristen to flip the switch, we nearly lost our heads.
(You might want to turn down your volume for this video. I was really excited.)
